Wine is traditionally sold by the bottle, usually in 70 cl bottles. However, it is drunk by the glass, and often sold in bars, cafes and restaurants by the glass in measures of different sizes. The bar, cafe or restaurant owner must supply glasses, dispense the selected wine from a bottle into the glass, collect empties and wash them up for reuse. There are thus significant capital and labour costs inherent in selling wine in the traditional manner by the glass. Usually only a small selection of popular wines will be supplied in this way since, once a bottle is opened, its contents will start to oxidise. Small amounts of wine left at the end of a bottle must generally be thrown away.
Because consumers drink wine by the glass, some would like to purchase it from take-aways, sandwich bars and supermarkets pre-packaged in single glass quantities. Attempts to supply wine in small cans has not proved a success, as wine drinkers are reluctant to drink from a can, so that a disposable glass needs to be supplied as well as the can. Supplying wine pre-packaged in sealed glass-shaped plastics containers is attractive to the organizers of outdoor events, as this removes the need to open bottles or cans to dispense wine and avoids any wastage. All that is required is the provision of waste bins for used plastics glasses. For sealed glass-shaped containers of wine to prove a commercial success, the wine must have an extended shelf-life. With a view to avoiding oxidation, the first attempts to fill and seal wine in plastics glasses filled the wine to the brim to largely eliminate any headspace containing air. This proved unsuccessful, as the wine was inevitably spilled when a user tried to remove the sealed lid. Users are only prepared to buy wine in a glass when they can see a clear headspace above the wine. Attempts have been made to fill the glass in environmentally controlled conditions with an inert atmosphere such as nitrogen, but this has added significantly to filling costs. Examples of this are disclosed in EP 1235501B (Pascal) and in PCT WO9605123 (Johnston). An attempt to overcome this problem has been the adoption of dished lids sealed to the edge of the glass but extending down into the glass itself to reduce any air-filled headspace to a minimum but without the wine being filled to the brim. Such an arrangement is disclosed in GB 2,385,577B (Valentine). However, this use of preformed lids rather than simple, generally flat, flexible film lids both adds to expense and still does not result in a filled product with an extended shelf life that has the clear headspace that customers desire.
The methods disclosed herein-below have arisen from our work seeking to overcome these problems and to provide in an economically efficient manner an aesthetically and commercially attractive filled and sealed beverage container, preferably though not necessarily exclusively, sealed plastics glasses of wine.